Part of it was that I work at Elle, and I’d hear young women in their 20s and early 30s who worked there saying they weren’t having orgasms from vaginal intercourse, as if there was something wrong with them. Being an old lady myself, I’d say to them, “Don’t you realize that there is no such thing as that for a lot of people?”

Q.

What was your own sex education like?

I graduated from high school in 1982, from public school in a suburb outside of Cleveland. It was not a liberal suburb or anything. But I had sex education there, and in 7th grade I took the Unitarian class that I mention in the article. The times were really different; it was the era of “Our Bodies, Our Selves.” I don’t think that my public-school sex ed was that great, but it was definitely in the air that women deserved to have pleasure and should demand it. In the Unitarian sex class I learned in great detail what that meant, and how I could get pleasure. I’m not saying that I went out and acted on it right away, but there were certainly strong ideas in my head.

Q.

As you say in the article, sex education has become such a political wedge issue that a lot of that access to information has grown more difficult. Can a class like Vernacchio’s be scaled up and reproduced in classrooms across America? Or is that structurally impossible?

A.

Sex education, the way it works now, is so locally determined. Under the Obama administration, the federal government has redirected some money away from pure abstinence education into more general teen-pregnancy-prevention programs, but I wasn’t really writing about that. In terms of the expansion of Al’s program, I think it would be the rare public school district and even the rare private school that would go for it. The other thing I didn’t really talk about in the piece is that there is a lot of competition for time during junior high and high school. The fact that Al has a full year to do the class every day would pose a problem at, say, New York private schools. They’re preparing for their SATs every day!

Q.

Did any parents at Vernacchio’s school complain that the subject was inessential, that the kids should be preparing for tests?

A.

Oh, no. It wasn’t an issue at Friends. It’s a Quaker school, and they have a broader view about what you need to live a good life and be a good citizen.

Q.

Do you think the class would be possible with someone who was even a little bit less perfectly unthreatening than Vernacchio? Does the fact that he’s gay make a difference to the students or parents?

A.

Nobody who gave off any kind of threatening vibe could teach the class, but it doesn’t revolve around him being gay. It just involves an ease in talking about sex, an openness to the kids. Al just exudes caring. He’s a special in many ways, but others could definitely do it.

Q.

In the story it’s not altogether surprising but still sad to read that pornography is the touchstone for most of these kids.

A.

I interviewed four boys privately, and the four all told me that they started looking at pornography around 6th or 7th grade. Definitely you got the feeling in the class, from what the girls said, too, that porn was a theme of their sex lives. New York magazine did that special issue on porn recently that I thought got down to that pretty well. It’s a reality that makes sense. It’s easier to masturbate to something that moves, I suppose.

Q.

It was so poignant when that one boy talked about trying to accustom himself to a real-life sexual experience after watching porn. The two were very different.

A.

One boy, who was worried about his penis size, really seemed to be influenced by porn. He knew somewhere in his mind that the body parts he’d been seeing were exaggerated. But with sex and things that are emotionally fraught for adolescents, who are roiling, knowing something in the back of your mind, or hearing something once, is not enough. The ideas really have to be mulled over and discussed.

Q.

I couldn’t help thinking that some of these lessons would be applicable for adults, too. Are there wider lessons for that 20-something and 30-something generation you mentioned?

A.

Definitely. I found that sex-ed classes were pretty common in colleges. and they are pretty widely subscribed. Paul Joannides, a sexuality instructor who gives talks on campuses, told me he was always amazed how even basic information about the pill seemed to be lacking. That reflects the fact that at some significant swath of schools, the education really is abstinence-only. And since the article came out, I’ve gotten tons of e-mails from adults telling me they wish they’d had the class in high school.

Q.

Of the 22 students in the class, 17 spoke to you privately. Clearly they had very individual experiences, from positive to extremely damaging. Did you come away from the class with any dominant impression?

A.

I came away feeling that in general the idea that young people are out there rampantly hooking up, going beyond kissing, rampantly giving oral sex to one another with all different kinds of partners — that wasn’t the situation. I asked one girl something like how many boys she’d been with. She said 25. I thought “Huh?!” She said, “Oh, I just mean kissing.” These things can get easily blown out of proportion. I don’t mean to be Pollyannaish about this, but I remember thinking it wasn’t that different from when I was in school.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…